Slightly Foxed but Still Desirable. Ronald Searle's Wicked World of Book Collecting.
London: Souvenir Press, 1989. Printing of the First UK Edition. A Fine tight copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. After a lifetime of avidly scanning the frequently poisonously-tinted pages of innumerable book catalogues, the renown illustrator Ronald Searle has become expert in the art of decoding those esoteric, poetic and usually approximate, descriptions of literary come-ons. In this clever and entertaining volume, he publishes his hard-earned findings in this fully illustrated pioneer guide, designed to foil the devious machinations of scheming and wicked booksellers for ever more. No longer will the innocent book collector need to puzzle over the finer meaning of 'old half road', 'good working copy', blind tooled', or 'tail-edged shaved'. The unvarnished truth is here exposed at last, both in the shocking explicit drawings and in the devastatingly frank glossary whose revelations will startle even the most battle-scarred of bibliophiles. The result is one of the funniest, most entertaining books to have emerged from the brilliantly perceptive pen of the master. No book collector, and certainly no bookseller, can afford to be without it - even the wicked ones. Item #28413
Price: $125.00 save 20% $100.00